Brian Eno Against
Interpretation

From Trouser Press, August
1982, by Steven Grant, kindly provided by Jeffrey Morgan.

This article is/is not about Brian
Eno's music.

He himself has written the following,
from a press release for his recent On Land LP:

"Lantern Marsh ... is a place only
a few miles from where I grew up in East Anglia, but my experience of it
derives not from having visited it ... but from having subsequently seen
it on a map and imagining where and what it might have been."

So we have imagined Brian Eno, as
experienced through music and press over the last 10 years. His music,
of course, is the primary source; Eno has largely suffered through
interpretation. His searching intelligence - not a quality highly prized
among rockers - works against him; almost alone among pop musicians, he
claims interest in a variety of fields, from painting to cybernetics.
Whereas his early pose led to a title of "Registered Cult Figure,"
later developments earned him the epithet of "prime theoretician of
rock."

On Land, a deft collection Eno
describes as "music that in some ways is related to a sense of
place - landscape, environment," makes clear that pop music must
relinquish any claim to him, except as producer. Our perceptions of him
thus require serious readjustment.

Eno lives up to much of his legend,
especially the part about inquisitive intelligence. But in person he
seems altogether different from his media image. His ideas lose the
glib, doctrinaire quality print so often gives them. His mercurial
thoughts wind through a network of interconnected references; with a
calm, unpretentious tone, he approaches each question like a careful but
curious explorer. There are also qualities mostly hidden from the public
eye. His conversation is littered with mild jokes and humorous
inflections. Contradictions sometimes appear; though he hates doing
interviews, he dives into them with obvious zest. He can even seem most
childlike, as when he momentarily becomes fascinated by globulles of
nicotine collecting inside his cigarette's plastic slip-on filter, or
when he savours the last mouthful - his favourite - of a meal.

Having pushed against the limitations
of rock on records like Another Green World and Before and
After Science , Eno has since created his own field: ambient music.
(he is also prominent in the neoteric realm of video art.) In the
following pages, Eno leads the way through his syncretic mind and
methods.

On Interviews:

I often wonder why people just don't
research the extant material. Things I say that I consider most
interesting usually never make the newspaper so I figure it's worth
going on, because maybe they will one day.

When I stop talking about pop music,
people stop listening. Pop music isn't by any means the central issue of
my life; it's hardly a peripheral one. Generally, I talk more about
other things. I don't think I even have anything very interesting to say
about [pop music].

For instance, I recently did an
interview... pathetic. I talked for two and a half hours, and I said
some things that were new to me. The reason I like to do interviews is
it's a discipline for me. I can think out certain things that I wouldn't
articulate otherwise. When you have a con versation with someone you
suddenly find you've said something in a clearer way than you ever
thought you could. It's the discipline of having to be articulate that I
find interesting. I use interviews in that way, to try to talk about
things that are fresh to me. In that particular interview, I spoke about
two or three things of that type, and none made it into the interview.
One was about the value of reading the Wall Street Journal - the
advantage of reading specific task-oriented publications, rather than
general publications like the New York Times.

I guess what I like talking about are
slightly more spiritual things than the nuts and bolts of contemporary
music. By spiritual, I don't mean religious. I mean things that deal
with your own spirit, your own sense of where you think you stand, where
anyone stands, in relation to the world at large. The only rationale I
have for doing interviews is that I want to think about certain things -
and I find the most convenient way to think about them is to put myself
in a situation where I have to be articulate. Lectures are another
version of that; I like doing them.

On Thinking:

I think in diagrams quite a lot. I
start making diagrams at a certain point in a conversation because, for
me, they're an easy way to understand complicated ideas.

This is a diagram I was using to
explain something [see below]. The question was, "Doesn't your work
see to jump around all over the place?" When I start working I have
an impression of where I think I'm going. When I hit a certain juncture
something catches my attention and I go off; then, another thing catches
my attention, and so on. At a point, I find I've drifted a long way away
from what I thought I was going to do, but I like what I've ended up
with. So I leave it there. This happens again and again on different
pieces of work. When I look back at these pieces of work I see they all
tended in a certain direction that wasn't clear to me at the time but
becomes clear in retrospect.

I can be fairly linear in my thinking,
but there are networks of thoughts, and certain ones keep coming around
again and again. I have a book of diagrams coming out, with notes; the
notes are essays, really. Have you seen a book of section maps called
The A-Z of London? On one side a map will be continued on page
64; on another side it will be continued on page 48, and so on. I've
always liked that idea. In my book, certain important ideas are
underlined, and on the side of the page it says "go to page 28"
- where you'll find a longer discourse on that idea. Within that
discourse, other ideas will be mentioned.

The idea of the book is that instead of
just going through it from beginning to end you trace a path that
interests you. On one page you might come up against "the momentum
of past events." Say you're more interested in what carries on from
a different idea; then you go to that part. What I like is that you will
continually recross the same paths after having gone through other
ideas, so presumably they'll receive a different inflection then. You
can read this book from beginning to end, but you don't have to. That's
my way of defeating linearity.

On Creative Process:

As soon as you externalize an idea you
see facets of it that weren't clear when it was just floating around in
your head. You say something and you suddenly think, "So that's
what I mean. Ah, yes. If I mean that, I must mean this as well."
You follow the implications of your own ideas in a way that you don't if
they remain tacit assumptions.

In organising a thought in any way an
unsuspected dimension is added to it. It's exactly the same way with
music. You work on a piece of music, you put in certain ingredients, and
suddenly they react in a way you hadn't predicted. If you're alert to
that reaction, that's what you work from. If you're stupid, you try to
cancel that reaction out.

A lot of prople have such a fixed image
of what the product should be that they refuse to allow any deviation.
Again and again, they'll force the music into a mold until it goes where
they want it to go. This generally leads to quite uninteresting music -
or uninteresting anything.

If you're an intelligent cook you'll
abandon the recipe at a certain time. You taste the dish and you realize
there's the seed of an interesting new taste. So you work on that and
forget you were making chicken Kiev, or whatever. You make something
new.

On Money:

I make a lot of money from productions,
collaborations. My records don't cost very much to make. They involve
quite a lot of studio time, but I always get deals. They also don't sell
terribly well - around 100,000, I suppose, which is enough to make some
money from. My music is used in quite a lot of films, TV things, other
uses. That's strictly bonus income, because they use stuff that already
exists.

On top of that, I don't spend anything,
really. I don't live an expensive lifestyle, and I don't travel as much
as you may think. I don't like traveling that much; I like staying home.
My extravagance is going to the movies.

On Film:

I'm very much a movie fan - although
not much of a Hollywood fan. I like European and Japanese films, not
because their concepts are necessarily more profound, but because their
texture and color are so superior to Hollywood. After Hollywood
abandoned Technicolor it never produced a decent color film again. By
and large, Hollywood color is like American color TV. There's no tactile
nature. In American television the object of lighting is to get
everything in the foreground to be as bright as possible, and everything
in the background far away. It's such an old-fashioned view.
Technicians' work; it doesn't look like artists are involved. European
or Japanese films capitalize on special qualities of light.

On Naturalism:

The concept of naturalism in any of the
recorded media is worthy of debate. Has a film got anything to do with
real life? I don't think it does. I saw a beautiful Japanese film called
Hunter in the Dark. There was a dark night scene set in a
greenish foggy marsh. A man in a purple kimono was in the top right-hand
corner of the wide-angle screen. There was no relationship to anything
you would see in real life, and it was absolutely staggering.

What do Fellini's films have to do with
naturalism? He works with the inaccuracies of memory. In Amacord
there's the tobacconist with the very big tits. In real life they
were probably not that big. But they were his first big tits, and he
remembers them as being very big. It's the opposite direction from
naturalism: elevating things to mythical; archetypal status. Make them
more dreamlike. That's a feeling I like a lot.

On Environment:

The recording studio allows you to
locate music wherever you want. You can create your own acoustic
environment. Mostly this is used fairly figuratively. If you record
music in a hall, it comes naturally with the acoustics of that hall.
When you listen to it, it recreates the sense of a hall in your living
room if you've got a decent stereo.

But a recording studio is deliberately
neutral acoustically, sometimes completely dead. The sound arrives on
tape free of any environment. You can make it sound like a concert hall
by using echoes and delays, or you can make it sound like a cathedral.
Or like it's set in a sky-scraper, or a forest. People have tended to be
naturalistic about this, except for Phil Spector or Jimi Hendrix.
Spector was ultra-naturalistic to the point of surrealism - like he was
recording in the biggest hall you ever heard.

I became interested in inventing places
for sounds. I often listen to music and get a picture of a certain time
of day, a certain type of light. I did that with On Land: for
each piece I had an image of a time of day. On Land is
specifically dedicated to the idea of creating places in music. It's a
record that very much celebrates the special things you can do in a
recording studio. Obviously, echoes are evocative because they remind
you of places. But the echoes on On Land aren't like anything
that could possibly exist. On some of these things I'm using 70-second
reverbs. Nothing like that exists in nature or in artifact; even the Taj
Mahal, which has very long reverberation, is only about 12 seconds.
Nonetheless, [the 70-second decay] is evocative of a type of space. It's
dramatized, just like Fellini amplifies the lady's breasts.

On Composing:

I'm always starting pieces of work.
It's the only thing I do, really; these pieces don't go anywhere. For
some reason, one of them will touch something in me. I never understand
why at the time. As soon as I've got that, I recognize it as being the
seed for something. There follows a period of looking at it in different
ways, putting things with it, seeing how it reacts with other things -
as you might do with a chemical.

The breakthrough stage is when I
suddenly get a strong sense of mood or place. It's like a fetal idea at
the time. I have to surround it with things that will nourish it, if you
like; that's when I start thinking about psychoacoustics and
electronics. Then craft enters into it.

Craft has to be dropped at a certain
point. You've gotten somewhere and you have to decide what you want to
do there. The sense of place becomes a seed for the sense of what
happens in that place. There's another way of working which is quite
different. I sit down and think, "If I connected this to this, and
I set this up this way so that this happens to that, something might
happen." That's the technological way of working: imagining a novel
technological situation. If you understand those technologies to a
certain extent, you have reason to believe a particular novel format
might give you something.

I was working in a studio in Canada
recently. They had a Fender Rhodes piano there, a standard studio
instrument I almost always ignore. I thought, "I'll use that for a
change. How can I use this to do something surprising?" I looked
around and found an old amplifier with a rattly speaker. I took the
speaker and sat it on the sustain pedal of a grand piano so the strings
were all open. The sound from the Fender Rhodes would make the piano
resonate in sympathy with it. Then I set up a microphone with a long
plastic tube on it, one of those tubes you spin to get a note. The tube
resonates at that frequency, so it was selective. (I did this with my
engineer, Danny Lanois, who always helps me very much.) I sat down and
checked out various notes on the Rhodes. One note - just one note - made
the whole system come to life. It made the speaker shake with a
beautiful purring sound, like a huge foghorn. The piano was ringing
away, and the pick-up through the tube particularly resonated around
that frequency and all the harmonics.

This was a case of having a
technological idea and then seeing if anything could be made of it. It
would have stopped there if that sound hadn't appeared. The avant-garde
technique would be to go ahead with it anyway, because the process is
supposed to be interesting in itself. I don't go for that. I think if
something doesn't jolt your senses, forget it. It's got to be seductive.

Of course, when I got that sound, I was
back in the seed position of the other way of working. It immediately
suggested a direction I still haven't resolved. I didn't find anything
more interesting than just the sound on its own. Everything I put on
covered up parts of the sound.

On Knowledge:

Luis Bunuel said that in a film every
object obscures another object. That's a great maxim for me. I have
another version of that: Every increase in your knowledge is a
simultaneous decrease. You learn and you unlearn at the same time. A new
certainty is a new doubt as well.

I wouldn't go so far as to say I know
what I'm doing. I know what I'm not doing to some extent now. People
imagine that you set your sights on a goal, then you struggle to get
there. I'm sure some people do that, but I never have.

From the age of nine or so, I knew I
wasn't going to get a job. I'd always maneuver. After a while of
maneuvering you find you are actually going in a directtion. A bit like
that diagram again, the inverse. It seems like all you're doing is
ducking things, but you realise there is a logic to it. The logic you
spot isn't the one you're operating under.

On Cycles:

I seem to have come full cycle: the
music I'm doing now is like the first music I ever did.

My first music used tape recorders with
static. The pieces started, stayed where they were for a while, and
ended. Nothing went forward but things shifted in relation to each other
on a plane - a familiar idea in modern music.

Then I went through a lot of other
things, this remaining as undercurrent. Gradually it became stronger and
stronger; that's the music I feel. I started to drop those elements that
occurred at other points in the loop, until I ended up with something
remarkably similar, except enriched by the interim journey. The result
of that journey is the acquisition of craft - the craft of using the
recording studio, which I certainly didn't have then.

On Craft:

What does craft do, I wonder? It
enables you to be successful when you're not inspired. When you start,
everything works on inspiration. You get excited about something and you
do it. But you can't sustain that. You cannot help but become blasé
about the area you work in. It doesn't have the same mystery -
consistently, anyway. You can't sit around waiting until you have
another flash.

On Work:

The point about working is not to
produce great stuff all the time, but to remain ready for when you can.
There's no point in saving, "I don't have an idea today, so I'll
just smoke some drugs." You should stay alert for the moment when a
number of things are just ready to collide with one another.

A lot of factors go toward creating a
work: technological considerations that suddenly are a little exciting
to you, some feeling or mood, a nice day, you just had a talk with a
friend. All sorts of things will coincide - and that moment doesn't last
for long. It's like things in orbit; they'll move away again.

The reason to keep working is almost to
build a certain mental tone, like people talk about body tone. You have
to move quickly when the time comes, and the time might come very
infrequently - once or twice a year, or even less.

On Ideas:

Ideas are the result of meta-ideas,
which are the result of meta-meta-ideas. I sometimes think I could put
together all the ideas I've ever had that led to interesting things in
about 20 seconds. Einstein said something like that: "Everything
I've ever done could be understood by an intelligent nine-year-old. The
only thing is, the nine-year-old wouldn't understand why it was
important."

An idea can generate a host of other
ideas, which in turn will generate a host of pieces of work. But those
ideas are oblique; they come from a direction we don't expect. They'll
keep coming back, but maybe not for a long time. I like to get them
first time around if I can.

On Memory:

I walked past an enormous rubber
plantation in Malaysia. It was a chaos of trees, thousands of them. I
thought it strange they should be planted so randomly. Then I reached a
point where I realized they were in absolutely straight rows. Only at
one point could I see that.

Particular ideas create a point of view
that organizes something that, from any other angle, is chaotic. The
same is true of memories. You think about your past as a kind of jungle.
Suddenly you'll have what I call a crack in time, where you can see
right through the gap to the field at the other end.

I see a lot of ways of setting up that
automatic patterning mechanism in myself. It has to do with perception;
where you stand in relation to something is what you understand about
it. I always saw a field of trees in rows, but what changed is where I
stood.

On New York:

I've always found this a barbaric city,
a wild place. Disorganized. I was in Chinatown recently. The smell of
burnt meat was in the air from someone cooking kebabs on the corner. One
of the Chinese restaurants had dead ducks hanging up. There was a tank
of fish in front of another place, and people on the street selling
things, bartering, haggling. A dwarf calligrapher was writing on the
window of a bank.

Suddenly I had an impression of how
similar this must be to a medieval European city, with all these weird
activities going on. I'm now able to live in New York with great
pleasure. I feel like I'm in a time capsule. I enjoy it a lot. I see the
Dark Ages all around.

If I can survive and do something I
like here, I can do it anywhere... except Los Angeles. On Land
became a way of dealing with New York. It constructed an alternate, more
desirable reality; these were the places I wanted to be. As I made these
pieces I found the ingredients here in New York. It's like what I said
about the alignment of trees. At a certain point I found out how to
align myself - like having a vision of New York as a medieval city.

On Ambient Music

I like it as an ambiguous term. It
gives me a certain latitude.

It has two major meanings. One is the
idea of music that allows you any listening position in relation to it.
This has widely been misinterpreted by the press (in their infinite
unsubtlety) as background music. I mean music that can be background or
foreground or anywhere, which is rather a different idea.

Most music chooses its own position in
terms of your listening to it. Muzak wants to be back there. Punk wants
to be up front. Classical wants to be another place. I wanted to make
something you could slip in and out of. You could pay attention or you
could choose not to be distracted by it if you wanted to do something
while it was on. I can't read with a pop record playing, or with most
classical records. They're not intended to leave that part of the mind
free - my mind, anyway. Ambient music allows many different types of
attention.

The other meaning is more pronounced on
On Land: creating an ambience, a sense of place that complements
and alters your environment. Both meanings are contained in the word "ambient."

Critics don't like these records, but
people do. The response has been really encouraging.

People are doing the most interesting
things with the records. I got a letter from a woman in Cleveland who
works with autistic children. She had one child who never spoke; he had
never made a single vocal noise in his life. Another one wouldn't sleep;
he was ultra-nervous, in a wretched state. She put Discreet Music
on one day, and the kid who had never slept just lay down on a concrete
floor and went to sleep. So she went to the group where this other kid
was, and she kept playing Discreet Music. And this little child
- not only because of the record, I'm sure, though the other one was -
started talking. I'm not claiming Discreet Music can make the
dumb talk, but it's nice to know it can be used as part of an atmosphere
that produces physiological change in people, or seems to.

When Music for Airports came
out and sold fairly well, I thought people assumed it was going to be
another Before and After Science. It takes a long while to learn
whether you're selling on the momentum of your successes. I don't think
that's so anymore. I've almost shifted audiences. I meet people who
never knew I made a record of songs.

Critics can't stand these records, by
and large, because in their search for eternal adolescence they still
want it all to be spunky and manic and witty. They come back to rock
music again and again, expecting to feel like kids. That isn't what I
want from music anymore - not in quite that way. I'm interested in the
idea of feeling like a very young child, but I'm not interested in
feeling like a teenager.